Strategy to fight Foreclosure : Produce the Note

I just caught an interesting video from ABC news about a way to fight or at least delay a foreclosure. They discuss it here: ABC News: Homeowners' Rallying Cry: Produce the Note
The idea is to ask the lender who is doing the foreclosure to produce the original mortgage note that you signed. The lender should have the original mortgage, but in many cases loans are bought and resold and bundled into securities and sold around so its possible they misplaced the actual note. If you simply ask them officially to produce the note then they may not have the note or at least could take some time to find it.

If you're in foreclosure and want to try and keep the home or at least buy some time then this seems like a good strategy to look into. Here's a detailed how-to article from Consumer Warning Network explaining you can request a lender 'produce the note'.

Best of Blog posts for the week February 27th

Jim at Bargaineering makes a good point with IRS Tax Payment Plan: Don’t Pay Taxes With A Credit Card

In The Foreclosure Crisis: Location, Location, Location fivecentnickel discusses how most foreclosures are in a few states.

Trent at The Simple Dollar does A Walkthrough and Cost Breakdown of Brewing Your Own Beer

Check out PFBlogs.org

I just got Free By 50 added to PFBlogs.org.

PFBlogs.org is an aggregator of personal finance related blogs. Basically that means its a one stop shop for a lot of personal finance blogs. If you're looking for personal finance articles then you can go straight to PFBlogs.org and see all the recent articles published by numerous personal finance blogs.

You can also look at articles just for Personal Finance, Real Estate or Investing.

There are a LOT of articles at PFBlogs.orgs so give it a look.

House Price Index (HPI) at OFHEO

Recently in a reply to my "Historical home prices by state" article Commenter Johnny pointed out:

I have found similar information on this site to be of great use:
http://www.ofheo.gov/hpi.aspx

The "House Price Index" is published by the govt and is calculated by state, region, and nationally. It is primarily used to track 4-quarter appreciation. The OFHEO site will allow you to compare states and regions, and you can download historical data going back to the 70s.

Its a nice tip on another source of housing values.

Like Johnny said, the House Price Index (HPI) at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight has detail on quarterly housing values for every state and major metropolitan area.

The front page of the HPI site has a graph showing nation wide 4 quarter % change in values. Plus there is a map showing in color the varying % changes by individual state from Q4 2007 to Q4 2008. Most states had "less than 1%" appreciation and most of those were negative. For example you can drill down on the map by clicking on Texas and it will take you to a graph of the four quarter appreciation % rates from 1991 to 2008 for Texas.

Looks like another good resource for information. I'd also remind you about the S&P Case-Shiller home price indices that I previously wrote about.

A word of caution: Any index or high level value is only good for ballpark references. Your individual home's value may have increased or decreased more or less than the overall trend for your city or state.